Abstract
The Irish and Irish migrants have been depicted as particularly prone to mental illness and institutionalisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on a global scale.1 Yet there has been only limited work on this phenomenon in the case of Irish migration to England.2 Across the period of our study, the relationship of Ireland, part of the British state until 1922, as well as Irish migrants’ relationship with the British Empire has been contested and debated.3 Irish migrant labourers were regarded as an important and necessary resource for the British Empire and Industrial Revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century — in comparison with the situation outlined in Alison Bashford’s chapter — there was a largely unmanaged movement of Irish migrants from Ireland to Britain, unchecked by immigration controls or medical examinations.4 Yet this migration prompted anxieties in terms of welfare provision and the obligations of the English Poor Law to provide for Irish paupers, and the Irish were blamed for exacerbating already dire conditions in many communities and for spreading disease. Large numbers of Irish migrants would also end up as patients in England’s growing asylum system, where, as in many other parts of the British Empire, they made up one of the largest — and in many years the largest — ethnic group.
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Notes
For example, see John W. Fox, ‘Irish Immigrants, Pauperism, and Insanity in 1854 Massachusetts’, Social Science History, 15 (1991), 315–36
Angela McCarthy, ‘Ethnicity, Migration and the Lunatic Asylum in Early Twentieth-Century Auckland, New Zealand’, Social History of Medicine,21 (2008), 47–65
David Wright and Tom Themeles, ‘Migration, Madness, and the Celtic Fringe: A Comparison of Irish and Scottish Admissions to Four Canadian Mental Hospitals, c.1841–91’, in Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne (eds), Migration, Ethnicity and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840–2010 (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 39–54
Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880–1940 (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1988).
Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘“A most miserable looking object” — The Irish in English Asylums, 1851–1901: Migration, Poverty and Prejudice’, in John Belchem and Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Irish and Polish Migration in Comparative Perspective (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2003), 121–32
Vishal Bhavsar and Dinesh Bhugra, ‘Bethlem’s Irish: Migration and Distress in Nineteenth-century London’, History of Psychiatry, 20 (2009), 184–98
Liam Greenslade, Moss Madden and Maggie Pearson, ‘From Visible to Invisible: The “Problem” of the Health of Irish People in Britain’, in Lara Marks and Michael Worboys (eds), Migrants, Minorities and Health: Historical and Contemporary Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 147–78.
Oliver MacDonagh, The Union and its Aftermath (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977)
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Terrence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony?: Economics, Politics, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005).
Anne Digby, ‘Moral Treatment at the Retreat, 1796–1846’, in W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (eds), Anatomy of Madness II. Institutions and Society (London and New York: Tavistock, 1985), 52–72
Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Politics and Ideology of Non-Restraint: The Case of the Hanwell Asylum’, Medical History, 39 (1995), 1–17.
The Great Famine was caused by a potato blight, which first hit Ireland late in 1845 and returned over consecutive potato harvests. Due to a combination of heavy dependence on the potato crop among agricultural labourers, limited industrial development and a heavily indebted and sometimes absent landlord class, the impact on the economy was devastating. See Mary E. Daly, The Famine in Ireland (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1986)
James S. Donnelly Jr., The Irish Potato Famine (London: Sutton, 2001)
Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics. The British Government and Irish Society, 1843–50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998)
Cormac Ö Gráda, The Great Irish Famine (London: Macmillan, 1989)
Cormac Ö Gráda, Black’ 47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, 1801–1921 (Irish Economic and Social History: Dublin, 1984), 5.
Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 82.
Donald MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
See J. Papworth, ‘The Irish in Liverpool, 1853–71: Family Structure and Residential Mobility’ (University of Liverpool PhD thesis, 1982); David Fitzpatrick, ‘Irish Emigration in the Later Nineteenth Century’, Irish Historical Studies, 22 (1980), 126–43
Donald M. MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 11.
By the late nineteenth century some Liverpool Irish lived in ordinary working-class districts and included substantial numbers of artisans and middle-class and professional elements. Also, in this later period, migrants moved into new settlement areas outside Liverpool: see Papworth, ‘The Irish in Liverpool, 1853–71’. 82 per cent, however, were listed as unskilled manual labourers: see John Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse: The History of the Liverpool-Irish 1800–1939 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 27
Suzuki, ‘The Politics and Ideology of Non-Restraint’; Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven, NJ and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 370–4.
See Catherine Cox, Hilary Marland and Sarah York, ‘Emaciated, Exhausted and Excited: The Bodies and Minds of the Irish in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Asylums’, Journal of Social History, 46:2 (2012), 1–26.
W. Ll. Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1972), 58.
Attempts to regulate the transfer of patients from workhouses to asylums were introduced under the 1862 Lunacy Acts Amendment Act: see Elaine Murphy, ‘The Lunacy Commissioners and the East London Guardians, 1845–1867’, Medical History, 46 (2002), 512.
David Fitzpatrick, ‘“A Peculiar Tramping People”: The Irish in Britain, 1801–1870’, in W.E. Vaughan (ed.), New History of Ireland VI. Ireland under the Union 1: 1870–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 623–60.
Gayle Davis, ‘The Cruel Madness of Love’: Sex, Syphilis and Psychiatry in Scotland, 1880–1930 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), 83–7.
LRO M614 RAI/40/2/6, Annual Report, Prestwich Asylum 1888, Report of the Medical Superintendent, 69. See also Thomas More Madden, ‘On the Increase of Insanity, with Suggestions for the Reform of Lunacy Laws and Practice’, Dublin Journal of Medical Science, 78 (July–December, 1884), 303–14
Daniel H. Tuke, ‘Increase of Insanity in Ireland’, Journal of Mental Science, 40:171 (October, 1894), 549–61
Ibid., 561. See also Catherine Cox, Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland, 1820–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 53–65
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© 2013 Catherine Cox, Hilary Marland and Sarah York
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Cox, C., Marland, H., York, S. (2013). Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity: Irish Migration and the Management of Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire. In: Cox, C., Marland, H. (eds) Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303233_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303233_3
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